The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Vanity Project? Sir Richard Branson. Image via CrunchBase

"I've read quite a bit about a battle I've supposedly launched with a certain newspaperman," Sir Richard Branson said this morning at the unveiling of Project, a new iPad-based magazine his Virgin Group is backing. That "certain newspaperman," of course, is Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. is weeks away from introducing an iPad newspaper called The Daily. "This is not a battle," Branson said. "This is not a war. It's the future of publishing."

"If you'd like to call it a battle, then call it a battle on quality," Branson continued. "I think when you see the competition, you might agree that our team win hands-down."

I asked Branson whether his confidence was based solely on his evaluation of Project, or whether he has some privileged intelligence on The Daily. "I have intelligence based on 30 years of reading News of the World and other newspapers they publish," he said. "We'll be willing to be judged, is what I'm saying."

Project's editor, Anthony Noguera, former of Arena and FHM, sought to downplay the rivalry. "It's a weird conflation of ideas, he said. "They're a daily newspaper. We are, effectively, a monthly style or culture magazine." Indeed, from what I saw, Project resembles a somewhat more serious-minded Vanity Fair, only with more Apple-enabled interactivity. (The "cover," for instance," is a video of actor Jeff Bridges rather than a static image; the cover story features audio snippets of him talking about his various film roles.) There's also a difference in terms of price: The Daily will cost 99 cents for a week's worth of issues, while a single monthly issue of Project costs $2.99 (although the issue's content is refreshed throughout the month, notes Noguera).

In any case, there's one way Project absolutely won't be like the Daily: the amount of advertising space devoted to promoting it. The latter will have the full support of the News Corp. empire while the former, Branson suggested, won't have much more than word of mouth. "We definitely don't have a Rupert Murdoch-like budget," he said. "If bloggers don't like it, we'll be dead very quickly."